Musings of … die junge Frau

I’m an avid Vanity Fair reader. I don’t subscribe, because while I could save money by paying up-front for 12mths-worth of issues, I simply wouldn’t have the patience to wait for my issue to arrive every month when it’s already on London’s newsstands.

{sidenote – not only is each month’s issue published and distributed the month before, but it’s getting earlier … the issues used to be on London’s newsstands on the 13th of the month prior; the last two issues I’ve bought closer to the 3rd of the month prior … time’s zooming past fast enough already, thank you very much!}

However I did gift my dad a 12mth subscription for his most recent birthday, so I guess I’m a subscriber of sorts.

Anyway, I was reading my treasured September issue on the train home this evening, and got to the article Day of the Crocodile. It’s a very moving and open article written by Peter Godwin, a journalist of Zimbabwean origin, looking at what the truth of Zimbabwe’s predicament is. The picture that Godwin paints is a truly disturbing one – of a society that seems to be the worst type of Lord of the Flies-style tyranny, where 70% of the population has fled, inflation is at 9 million percent and violence is the only known political communication.

I also find the awful things that people will do to each other to be both amazing and horrifying. After the last 150yrs of mass media, mass communications and mass migration I would (naively it seems) like to think that people would learn from past events … the pogroms of medieval Europe, the Holocaust, Stalin’s Great Purge, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the military coups of Latin America, the recent Balkan war, the Iran-Iraq war, amongst others … that politics and political power that is gained and maintained by violence never lasts, and eventually ends in the violent demise of the despot and their supporters. And that uncountable numbers of the ‘little people’ are killed, maimed and have their lives destroyed in the process.

I really recommend that you read Godwin’s article, and I hope you find it moving as well. I’m off to Google ways that I can contribute to the communal voice speaking up for the poor, displaced, dispossessed, terrified, tyrannised and incredibly brave people of what should be a prosperous and beautiful country.